SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – A group of Scandinavian scientists has broken the record for data transmission, using only a laser and one optical chip, sending almost 2 petabits per second of information.
The international group is from the Technical University of Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. In their experiment, they were able to set the record by sending 1.84 petabits per second, almost twice the total Internet traffic in the world.
The data was carried from one infrared laser to a custom-designed optical chip called a “frequency comb.” The comb uses the light from a single infrared laser and splits it into a rainbow spectrum of multiple frequencies or colors, allowing hundreds of frequencies to hit the single chip.
Current commercial equipment would require 1,000 lasers to do the same job as the demonstration of the group’s ability to send 1.8 petabits per second on a single chip.
To put the speed at which the data was transmitted into perspective, the average home gets a few hundred megabits per second. Those who are lucky get over a 1-gigabit connection.
The upcoming upgrade to the scientific network could be put to use by some of the top minds in the world and could even help NASA with space exploration.
The research on the experiment was published in the journal Nature Photonics and Professor Leif Katsuo Oxenløwe, the lead author of the study, shared that the comb will allow for increasingly efficient data transmission.
“The reason for this is that our solution is scalable – both in terms of creating many frequencies and in terms of splitting the frequency comb into many spatial copies and then optically amplifying them, and using them as parallel sources with which we can transmit data,” Katsuo Oxenløwe said. “Although the comb copies must be amplified, we do not lose the qualities of the comb, which we utilize for spectrally efficient data transmission.”
Still, Katsuo Oxenløwe and his team are not near being done with the new chip, as they will continue to work to improve it. The researchers claim they could even hit speeds of 100 petabits per second.
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